March 19, 2017

Saal Digital / A Product Test

Before I'll start: As you can tell, this is not a 365 photo project post. That's because I'm currently very busy with my uni applications (and also very anxious), so I hope you'll understand that I need to put all my creativity into that. I'm most likely to continue the photo project in a month, I guess (even thinking about bringing back my short extracts of my diary that I used to include on my old blog). And before I don't post anything at all, I wanted to do this product test. What I have to say at this point is that I was not told to say anything in favour of this company, so this is my raw opinion on them. Pinky promise.

Now to the actual product test and a short explanation of the what and why: Saal Digital claims to be one of the leading photo services in Europe. At this moment, they are looking for testers who are supposed to have a closer look at their photobooks and it seemed perfect for me since I haven't printed my annual photo book yet. If you're a blogger who's interested in testing, you can also apply here.

Information on what I ordered: 21x28 Format. Matte cover and inside. Without wadding. 26 Pages. No barcode placement (very positive thing you can do!). That would make 34,95€ in total. That's the average price you usually have to pay for the most photobook services too (at least the ones that were designed for non-professionals).

The ordering process: Like other photo services, you had to download a software to design your book. The program is very simple and even provides you layout templates. For me, those templates were too cheesy (the typical sticker/clipart templates that you thought were super cool at the age of 10). But luckily you're also able to design your own layout, so that's what I did. And I (that's typical for me now) went for the minimalistic look. Designing was pretty easy therefore. What I missed from the standard fonts was my beloved Courier (but nostalgia hit me that they indeed had Comic Sans which was our all beloved font when we were - you guessed it - 10). But that's just me being petty here, layouting was fun y'all and I literally spent a night doing it (don't forget to always save after a while!).

The result: It took four days for the package to come and the first thing I recognized was it being not plastered with any advertisements which is super positive for me since I don't really like it when everybody knows what I ordered. But aside from that: I usually don't get that much excited about my year books but when I went through the pages of this one, I got so hyped. Again, I was not sponsored to say this stuff, but 1. the quality of the photos were surprisingly good (especially for that price) considering colour and resolution. 2. The pages are very thick, so it feels like it couldn't be ripped so easily. 3. No advertisement to be found anywhere, so I can actually use this as a portfolio.

So: I am super super super happy with this book and will definitely keep using the Saal Digital service. Like I already said, I really didn't expect a huge difference to the usual photo books but I was proved otherwise. The only thing that could be improved is the layouting software - it seemed a tad outdated in relation to templates.